Weak mobile policies pose a cyber risk to businesses: Deloitte

Businesses are increasingly concerned about the high security risks posed by allowing employees to use their own mobile devices on work systems, a Deloitte report has found.

Having last year been flagged as an emerging concern in the global survey, technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) organisations elevated the security risk associated with mobile devices to the second highest spot this year. About three-quarters or 74 per cent of respondents rated the risk “high or average"; in 2012 they just “feared" them.

Deloitte technology risk leader Dean Kingsley told The Australian Financial Review that mobile devices didn’t make the top three concerns last year as people only saw them as an “emerging" problem. “But you’ve now got largely disparate handsets and operating systems [in the workplace]," he says. “It’s a complex landscape and CIOs say it’s really hard in the BYOD [bring your own device] world.

Kingsley flags Google’s Android operating system as more of a security concern than other operating systems such as Apple and BlackBerry. “We’ve been positioning that malware on mobile devices would explode and over the last year it has begun," he says. “We’re seeing a focus on Android as source of concern."

Half of the organisations surveyed were yet to address a BYOD policy sufficiently, the report found. Just over 50 per cent had a policy, and 10 per cent did not address BYOD risks at all.

The report showed third-party partnerships were the biggest risk among TMT organisations with 79 per cent concerned that their data would be shared and exposed in ways they could not control.

Despite surveyed organisations recognising that the threat had become more complex, conversely the survey also found the confidence businesses had in having the threats covered was also higher.

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“It’s the idea that it’s the other person’s fault if there is a problem, but the collective fundamental philosophy here is if you’re in a supply chain you need to get together and collaborate."

Meanwhile, hacktivism, or social and political activism online, through hacking or denial of service attacks was referenced in the study for the first time, with 63 per cent rating it as a major concern.